Becoming a Maker: Simspancake’s Journey

Editor’s Note: Simspancake began creating custom content for The Sims 4 with “literally zero skills.” Now, they’ve made their debut as a member of the Maker Program. This is their story.

One day, I started playing The Sims 3 right off the disc on a family member’s old laptop. 

I quickly became obsessed.

The first time I opened the game, I was blown away by the amount of stories I was able to tell, and I’ve been playing ever since. As a writer, dating-sim lover, and artist, The Sims gave me the freedom to create crazy stories, unleash drama, and express my creativity. I even remember drawing Bella Goth when I was younger! 

My drawings quickly grew to include my own concept art for items and clothing that I dreamed of seeing in the game. As soon as I discovered custom content (CC), I started using it to personalize my Sims, houses, and stories.

During one fateful YouTube scrolling session, I found a tutorial on creating custom content. 

I never looked back.

I had literally zero skills when I started. Learning everything from scratch was a tough process, but I had so much fun doing it. Texturing became my favorite part of CC creation because it allowed my existing drawing ability to shine, especially my understanding of light and shadow.

Here’s my texturing workflow:

I start in a Blender add-on, where I unwrap the UV map and create a blank canvas for the asset I’m creating. Next, I add an Ambient Occlusion (AO) map based on the scene’s lighting and start building the texture.

I organize every element with separate layers: seams, highlights, details, and base colors. This makes creating swatches and color variations more efficient, and it allows me to fix mistakes without starting over from scratch. After a couple hours of hand-painting, my diffuse map is finished.

Finally, I generate the normal and specular maps and test lighting effects to see how the map reacts. 

My very first piece of CC was a recolor of a female top from The Sims 4 base game. Even though it wasn’t very complex, I’m still proud of the piece and the challenges I overcame to create it. Most CC tutorials were in English, which is not my first language, so following every technical step without missing anything was difficult. 

The final result wasn’t exactly what I expected, but it inspired me to keep learning so I could create exactly the pieces I envisioned. 

I continued practicing, but I never imagined this would turn into a platform that has given me so many amazing opportunities to create for the community. The Sims 4 Businesses & Hobbies Expansion Pack inspired me to create a set of CC furniture that players could sell in their small businesses with matching decor. It was very well-received and marked the beginning of my journey. 

I had only been creating CC for about a year when I had the opportunity to join the Maker Program, so it felt like a massive step for me as both a creator and a Simmer. 

The application process was smooth and easy to follow. The Sims team provided documentation to guide my work into the program. To any prospective Makers interested in joining: don’t be scared of the process!

From there, I started working on my first official Maker Pack. Makers have access to a suite of new tools, but we have a user-friendly interface and clear documentation to help, which also taught me professional game development concepts that transformed my workflow. Plus, every update to our tools adds new features based on Maker requests.

With the release of that first pack, my work reached players all over the world. When I started playing The Sims, I never could have imagined that one day, a pack I created myself would be part of my favorite game!

This journey started as a hobby, and now it’s a substantial part of my life. It means the world to me as a player and artist, and I’m so grateful for the opportunity to reach new audiences and hone my craft.

Optimization in particular was a major learning curve for me when I first joined the Maker Program, but thanks to the resources I received, I now understand the process for ensuring the game runs smoothly across platforms through Levels of Detail (LoD). 

Nearly every asset in The Sims 4, from the environment to the Sims themselves, uses LoDs. When a player zooms in, the game displays the high-detail model, and as they zoom out, the game swaps in lower-detail models to preserve performance.

My optimization workflow starts by building the highest-detail model (LOD0) alongside the diffuse map. Back in a Blender add-on, I use tools and modifiers to simplify the geometry for lower LoDs, making sure the silhouette stays distinct and the texture map projects cleanly. 

This process takes up a significant portion of my development pipeline. It’s the most important step in creating professional, game-ready assets, and the Maker Program provided access to the tools that helped me develop those skills.

From my own experience, I can assure anyone who is thinking about applying to the program but is feeling unsure about their skills or content that there is nothing to fear. Once I dove in, I realized it wasn’t as intimidating as it seemed. I love that no matter the creative path I want to pursue, this program will give me the freedom and tools to make the content I want to see in The Sims.

Interested in bringing your own ideas to life in The Sims? You can apply to the Maker Program or check out the FAQ for more information.